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Each time I land back in Bangalore, I get all nostalgic about what it used to be like. We moved to Bangalore in 1996 - it was quite green at the time. I spent most of my time around the Malleswaram / Yeshwantpur / Mathikere area, so changes to those three regions is what I really take notice of .. Sampige and Margosa roads definitely were lined with trees, perhaps the same trees whose names they have. My entire trip from home to school and back were on roads that were lined with trees on both sides. There were some mom and pop shops and a few eateries on the way, but mostly Malleswaram, which is where my school was, was a nice and quiet residential area. It was easy to simply walk home from school if my auto driver did not show up for some reason. Even a few years later, when I changed schools and joined NPS in Rajajinagar, we could still enjoy a long walk home on relatively uncrowded footpaths that were still tree lined. In fact me and some of my friends used to wait till the last day of school to walk back home on foot so the cramps that came later wouldnt be a problem the next day :)

Twenty years later, things are so drastically different. I would not attempt to walk from where my school sits to where my home used to be anymore - the trees are all gone; there are large shops everywhere, and the number of people who still reside there has reduced vastly - most folks simply sold their houses and moved to flats since it made financial sense.

Even the IISc campus, which is where I used to live, is no longer the same. They have added a lot more buildings, and the trees are all covered in dust from all the construction around them. There used to be an entire field full of trees with yellow flowers on it - it used to be one of my favorite places to walk by. Those trees are all gone, and it is replaced with a bunch of buildings now. Even Bumgalow no 7, where we lived for about twenty years has now changed. The lovely garden than my mother painstakingly made is almost entirely gone - the plants have been almost entirely replaced with cement. All the flowering plants are gone, and only a couple of the big trees we planted remain now. All we have remaining of the place are pictures we took while we were there. Oh, and memories.

I think sometimes about how differently my children are growing up - there are some trees around, but they only have leaves during the summer :(.. we have no garden of our own, so we cant talk about the trees that the children planted. And we certainly dont have any flowers around. Nor do we sit outdoors and read books or play while watering the plants. For the longest time, I was against buying a home - I felt they made no financial sense. After all the interest and mortgage you pay, plus the commute you add, it makes little sense to actually buy, if you are logical about it. But lately I have been wanting to create a sense of being rooted somewhere - of creating a place that we will always think of as home, where we can plant our trees and memories and little family traditions. I guess having a home is an emotional thing. Maybe that is obvious to everyone else. Guess the understanding came to me only now :)

Hillary Clinton and the Filter Bubble

I was reading the book "What Happened" by Hillary Clinton. Its a book about her failure during the 2016 elections - she relives pretty much every excruciating detail of that election but at the end of it, I got the sense that she did not quite understand why she lost.

I dont think anyone understands precisely why. Normally I would have been very uninterested in a topic such as this one. However, this general election was fought on a new turf - the internet. It was extremely interesting to me how much of the war was actually information warfare. Clinton, by her own admission, is not very technically savvy, and I am guessing she did not understand the complexity of what was going on around her during election time while it was happening. Most likely, none of us did, at that point. 

True, Russian interference might have been a part of the problem. This is one of the problems listed out by Clinton. However, I think that the filter bubble would have amplified the problem as well - once Facebook or Google gets even a minor (or even erroneous) signal that you are interested in negative coverage about Hillary, it will bombard you with such types of items. Worse, it is also likely to show you positive coverage about Trump, because other readers with such tendencies are consuming more such articles. In short, it creates a vicious cycle. 

Dont believe me? Here is an example:

I once happened to click on an article regarding Kareena Kapoor. It was something about her and losing weight after she became a mommy. I was pregnant, and wanted to know what she had done to lose weight afterwards. I am not a fan of hers, never have been, and am unlikely to ever become one in the future. My interest was just in her fitness. However, since reading that article I started to get a daily dose on Kareena Kapoor from Google Now. I did not observe the change in frequency right away. And without thinking I clicked on some stories and ignored others. Soon enough, more and more stories about Kareena Kapoor started to appear, until half my newsfeed was about this lady. By now I realized what was happening, and then started reversing the trend - I completely stopped clicking on the links, started clicking on items that were more interesting / representational for me etc. Also I tried to make sure all my searches were in incognito. Slowly Kareena Kapoor  stopped dominating my feed. I still get about 1-2 stories about her everyday. I dont click the stories, so the algos mustbe figuring out that I dont care anymore.

Now imagine someone who doesnt even know what the filter bubble is. And this person sees some disparaging remarks about Clinton and clicks on it. Soon that person will start getting a steady stream of such topics - and very likely they will keep looking at those feeds because they are interested in knowing whether or not Clinton made mistakes. The fact that they click on the news items will reinforce the "personalization" algos, and they will crank out more stuff that makes Clinton look bad.

Clinton losing the election was very much a result of how the internet works today. I wonder if the folks who wrote it thought about these far reaching consequences when they first implemented Personalization. I am guessing a few engineers who wanted to squeeze out better performance from the search engine (and who probably wanted a promo for themselves) never thought about the adverse effects it will have on the US elections.

It seems to me that I notice such unintended consequences around me w.r.t. nearly everything - antibiotics, for example. Whowever thought it would start getting used so much for raising chickens and cowns? And who ever imagined superbugs that were resitent to antibiotics?

Maybe I am noticing such things because I am getting older. Age gives you perspective.  

A silver lining for the Manifesto

The past few weeks at work have been eventful, to say the least. Much has come out in the news about a doc that a now ex-employee wrote, and much discussion has happened about the doc internally as well.

A lot of my women colleagues feel angry, depressed and hurt by the doc (To be fair, most men are against it too). Some men on the other hand dont see anything wrong with what the doc advocates. And thats leaving the women even more hurt and angry, because that proves this is a general notion that men have, rather than the author of the doc being an isolated case.

I am writing this down to clear my own views about the contents of the doc. I dont agree with it - as a woman, its only natural that I feel that way.

But I am not hurt or angry about it. I was a little surprised by it, I will admit to that. I did not think that men from developed countries thought this way - I had associated these types of ideas with men from countries like India. It was eye opening to see that this was not quite the case.

Personally though, I think the doc helped me.

I am pregnant with my second child, and I think often about whether I am prioritizing the right things.. I wonder if am I being a selfish mommy who wants to have a serious job when I could sit at home and be with my children all day long. I wonder if am I being selfish to pursue my own interests. I wonder if I am neglecting my children by not spending every waking moment with them. I wonder whether it would be better for me to quit.

But the contents of that doc, and some of the responses from men who used to think like that made me realize that a lot of them grow up with this attitude because their mothers did not work outside the home. In my view, there is only one way to change that - and that is to get more women to be in the workplace so the next generation has fewer people who believe this. I think I came to this conclusion because my husband is so supportive of my work - and I think the reason he is that way is because his own mother worked as an engineer until she retired at age 55. 

So now I look at my work as not just something I do for myself - it is something I do for my children as well, in order to raise them as supportive, understanding future colleagues, husbands and/or fathers. I look at it as my contribution to society.

And that makes me resolved to stay in the workforce. So thank you, James Damore.

Office of the First Lady.

So much has been said and written already about a lot of President Trump's policies that I will prefer to keep off of those topics.

Today my topic is about the role of Ivanka Trump in her daddy's presidency. It seems to many that her (and perhaps her daddy's administration's) intention is to sweep aside Melania Trump, who seems more than willing to be swept aside as First Lady and instead create a role of a "First Daughter". A lot of comments on Twitter show that this is the popular  sentiment - some comments chide her saying "What the hell are you doing meeting with a foreign leader" and "Unelected women should not get a seat at that particular table". While I completely agree with that sentiment, what I dont get is why people think it is acceptable for a president's wife to join him in his official duties but not the daughter.

I came to America soon after Obama won his first election - and one of the first things I noticed was how much coverage Michelle Obama got on television. She seemed to go with him everywhere, her wardrobe got a lot of attention, and I also realized that prior to him being elected, she even made speeches on his behalf at the Democratic National convention (and so did his opponent's wife). Why are spouses so important to the presidency?

Where I come from, I dont think the spouses of Prime ministers have any role to play - sometimes a picture of them might crop up in a newspaper because they happened to be close by, but its usually just an accident. No one usually bothers even interviewing them, except maybe in a memoir or  an occasional magazine article, perhaps after the tenure is finished.

Here though, its a different game altogether. There is an actual "Office of the First Lady"; they are supposed to be fashion icons, and of course they better be good speakers because they are going to be making speeches all along their husband's tenure. To top it all off, there is the inherent sexism in the title itself, which suggests that the spouse will always be a woman.

It is interesting to note the history of this role. It started with the spouses wanting to be addressed as "Lady", "Mrs. President" etc - it seems to me they were trying to emulate the role of a queen in a country where monarchy was non existent, perhaps trying to mirror the social setup of other countries at the time. But as monarchies elsewhere collapsed and have given way to democracies and none of the other countries have such an "office" for the spouse of their country's premier anymore, does it not make sense to abolish this whole "First Lady" thing and move on? Like Ivanka's criticizers pointed out, they are not elected and should not have a seat at the table. If they have political aspirations, certainly, they can do what Hillary Clinton did - maintain her own political career and try her own hand at the elections.

The existence of such an office only seems to allow the president's immediate family to create a political career of their own if they wish to do so - and that should not really be the case in a true democracy.

Wishful Thinking

I learned recently that it is easier to go through pain yourself than to watch your children be in pain. Anyone who has held their own eight month old baby while a nurse was drawing blood will know what I am talking about. My baby was screaming his head off and trying to get out of my iron grip, all the while looking straight into my eyes as if to ask me "Is this what you reward me with for all the trust I place in you?"

I felt like I had let him down.
And I can tell you, its much harder than letting yourself down.
Or letting your parents down.

 And then I remembered Theranos. That little company I had read about whose founder hated to have blood drawn and so was launching this company that could stop this whole process and conduct tests with blood from just pin pricks. Just what I am looking for. Just what any parent will be looking for.

I couldnt resist looking up how much progress they had made once I came back home. Unfortunately they dont seem to be doing that well. I hope they turn around though - such a shame to have to insert needles into every baby just to have them tested :( 

The trouble with "doing your own research"

For the last few months I have been hearing the words "do your own research" quite a few times. It was given to me as sensible no nonsense advice by a few colleagues when I was pondering over some medical issues I was having at the time. Usually the advice means "ignore what the doctor is saying, go and read some medical literature yourself".

I was surprised by the suggestion, because from my perspective, the doctor knows best. I rarely question their opinion and authority, if I think a particular doctor is not good enough I just go to another one after checking their credentials. In no circumstance would I bother to sit and read medical literature all by myself. Yet that is what folks around me seem to do - they search and find the latest research on any given medical issue, spend a lot of time understanding whatever those conclusions are and then accept that as the truth. They seem to think that it is the right way to make decisions - by reading all available material on their own exhaustively and then coming to a conclusion on their own. In my mind, this is nonsensical, because to me that is what the doctor is supposed to do - I am paying the doctor so they will do all this for me. What then is the point of me spending all that time reading stuff up on my own? And what makes people think that they can somehow know better than someone who went through years of specific training to be able to make these types of decisions?

Yet here we are - more and more people insisting that they know better than doctors because they have "done their own research". I wonder what causes them to depend so much on their own research. I wonder if they have paused to think about what "doing my own research" really means. To me if one really had to do one's own research, one would have to set up a lab, devise a scientifically sound experiment to prove or test whatever it is that one is curious about and get the funding and carry out the experiment on your own. None of the folks talking about "Doing one's own research" is doing that. Instead they are simply reading published papers and believing that it is the absolute truth - how do they know it was not cooked up? Why is reading the paper somehow "doing one's own research"? Dont they know that a lot of experimental results are fabricated anyway?

I wish people would give more thought into what they call "research" before labelling their literature survey as "research".

The Price of Progress

Its hard not to think about what the future holds for us. In the last fifty years we have seen nearly every sector disrupted because of technology, and it doesnt look like that process is going to stop anytime soon.

One of the things I think about are people who make a living driving. We use Uber pretty often, and I sometimes talk to the drivers to see how and when they started out as Uber drivers. There are some folks who say they gave up their day jobs because this was paying more. One that I was talking to just a few days ago said she had not had any other job for more than one and a half years. And she has a Masters degree from NYU! She talked about how difficult it was to find a decently paying job, and that no one cares about her degree. It was sad to listen to her because I know that sooner or later she will find herself out of this job as well - my guess is that in five to ten years, unless this country puts regulations in place, we will have a self driving car service that will be way cheaper. And these guys will unfortunately not be able to compete against those, and will soon have to find something else to do. Its the same with truck and bus drivers.

Another area where disruption is going to happen is delivery services. All those delivery service folks who are raking in money now because of the popularity of the rise in demand for delivery will sooner or later find themselves out of a job - when the drones figure out how to do it faster and cheaper.

There are so many areas like these where change is happening. Folks who make this kind of progress happen think they are doing everyone a service - it takes away the need to have people engaged in work that can easily be automated, freeing people to engage in more creative pursuits. Their reasoning is : no one should have to sit behind the wheel of a truck for hours at a time to earn a living. Instead, we should have folks who create software that can drive cars around automatically.

Unfortunately, the question arises: what can these folks do instead that will not require specialized skills? The trouble with all the progress we are making is that it removes large numbers of jobs that dont need a lot of skill and adds a few jobs that are extremely specialized and skill based. The folks whose jobs got taken away will never be able to hold the jobs that got created by this type of disruption. We will eventually eliminate the need for unskilled / low skilled labor and only have a market open for smart, creative, skilled and extremely competitive folks who are willing to work round the clock to keep their jobs. And because these jobs are going to be few in number, they will have to work harder and harder to make sure they are not taken away by someone else. And obviously, their work is going to make more and more jobs irrelevant as time passes by. Essentially, we are progressing in a direction where we will eventually put most folks out of a means of livelihood, and the gap between the rich and poor will increase further. The only difference will be that the everyone will have the opportunity to try to get one of those few jobs; the ones who dont will only be able to blame their genes and upbringing.

So what am I proposing? That we call the world to a halt and stop all progress? Grind growth and subsequently the economy to a halt? Where would that leave us?

For a long time I had this post written up until here and I felt I couldnt post it because I had no answers. I thought the answers will come to me in time, but it hasnt. So I am going to post this, hoping the answer will arrive afterwards and it can be added in as an update later.

Update as of Aug 2017: There is a company called Humu that is attempting to solve this problem. There is also some research into Basic Income that Ycombinator is doing, that seems like it is attempting to solve the same issues. Happy to realize that I am not the only one thinking this way and that we are hopefully going to make some progress on this problem.